[✔️] July 4, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*July 4, 2022*/

/[ democracy requires participation]
/*Bill Nye says the main thing you can do about climate change isn’t 
recycling—it’s voting*
Mon, Jul 4 2022/
/- -
Nye spoke just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a new 
landmark ruling that limits the Environmental Protection Agency’s power 
to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants. President 
Biden called the ruling, which is expected to make it more difficult for 
the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions, a “devastating decision.”

Nye called the predominantly conservative Supreme Court “a controversial 
bunch,” and described the ruling as an act of “human negligence.” He 
noted that the ruling places a greater burden on the U.S. Congress and 
state legislatures to pass stronger laws aimed at protecting the 
environment — though, in some cases, enforcing those laws can be 
complicated.

“What we’ve got to do is pass better laws,” Nye said. “The Supreme Court 
does what the law says, so we just have to pass laws that are more 
direct, more specific, more in everybody’s best interest.”/.../
/- -/
“That’s the big message,” Nye said. “Humans are now the stewards of the 
whole thing. So we have to take the whole planet into account the whole 
time.” /
/https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/04/bill-nye-the-best-way-to-fight-climate-change-is-by-voting.html/
/

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/[ another simple activism  ]/
*Petition to Phase Out GHG Pollution to Restore a Stable & Healthy Climate*
The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) gives the Environmental 
Protection Agency (EPA) the power to regulate a substance that presents 
an unreasonable risk of injury to our health and the environment. That 
includes requiring its clean-up – as in Superfund sites.  It has been 
invoked for the regulations of lead paint, PCBs, dioxin, asbestos, and 
CFCs (which are greenhouse gasses).

On Thursday, June 16, 2022, five petitioners and the Climate Protection 
and Restoration Initiative (CPRClimate.org) filed the Petition to Phase 
Out GHG Emissions to Restore a Stable and Healthy Climate with EPA.

Organizations and individuals can endorse the petition and sponsor the 
campaign
Please forward this to others who are concerned about the climate crisis.
https://cprclimate.org/about/actions-campaigns/petition-to-epa/



/[ Noam Chomsky appropriate holiday message - video starts 7 mins in ] /
*Noam Chomsky issues warning*
Jun 27, 2022  For a full transcript, please email: 
info at ussolarcoalition.org...
Dr. Chomsky defines three possible cataclysmic disasters humans face. 
Climate change, a nuclear accident or provocation and the newest, and 
perhaps most frustrating is our current inability to engage in rational 
discourse because of the most dangerous organization in human history.

Taped in Albuquerque, NM at the University of New Mexico during the 
American Solar Energy Society's 51st Annual Conference, June 21, 2022.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIv-glBvrrc



/[//"When in Doubt, Stay Out" -- says Centers for Disease Control ]/
*Avoid Harmful Algae and Cyanobacteria*
Harmful algae and cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue-green algae, can 
produce toxins (poisons) that can make people and animals sick and 
affect the environment. Learn more about them to keep you, your family, 
and your pets safe.

Algae and cyanobacteria are simple, plant-like organisms that live in 
water. Algae and cyanobacteria can quickly grow out of control, or “bloom.”

Blooms can occur in fresh water, salt water, and brackish (a mixture of 
fresh and salt) water around the world. Blooms sometimes look like foam, 
scum, mats, or paint on the surface of the water. They can even make the 
water appear different colors, including green, blue, red, or brown.

Blooms are more likely when water is warm, slow-moving, and full of 
nutrients such as nitrogen or phosphorous. Nutrients get into water when 
fertilizer, sewage, or runoff from cities and industrial buildings 
washes into lakes, rivers, or oceans—for example, during rainstorms.

Blooms of algae or cyanobacteria can harm people, animals, or the 
environment if the blooms

    Make toxins
    Become too dense
    Use up the oxygen in the water
    Release harmful gases

Effects of climate change, such as warmer water, might be making blooms 
worse.

*How People and Animals Get Sick*
Animal Safety Alert

When in doubt, keep animals out!  Download CDC’s Animal Safety Alert 
fact sheet for tips to protect your pets, or order free printed copies 
from CDC-INFO On Demand.

People and animals (including pets, livestock, and wildlife) can get 
sick when they have contact with water or food that contains certain 
types of algae, cyanobacteria, or their toxins.

People and animals can get sick if they:

    Swim, wade, or play in or near contaminated water
    Eat contaminated fish, shellfish, or supplements
    Drink contaminated water
    Illnesses and symptoms can vary depending on how a person or animal
    was exposed (came into contact with algae, cyanobacteria, or their
    toxins), how long they were exposed, which type of toxin was
    present, and how much toxin was present.

Symptoms in people can include:

    Stomach pain, vomiting, or diarrhea
    Headache, fever, tiredness, or other general symptoms
    Skin, eye, nose, or throat irritation
    Neurological symptoms such as muscle weakness or dizziness
    Exposure to some toxins—particularly cyanobacterial toxins—can also
    harm your liver and kidneys. If you think you may have symptoms
    caused by harmful algae, cyanobacteria, or their toxins, contact
    your healthcare provider or poison control center...

Animals can get very sick or even die within minutes to days after 
exposure to harmful algae and cyanobacteria. Seek veterinary care 
immediately if your pets or livestock seem sick after going in or near 
water. Animals are often the first affected, in part because they are 
more likely to swim in or drink from bodies of water that contain 
harmful algae or cyanobacteria.

*When in Doubt, Stay Out*
You can take steps to protect yourself and your pets from getting sick 
from harmful algae and cyanobacteria:

    -- Check for swimming and fishing advisories before visiting lakes,
    rivers, and oceans. Follow advisories to reduce your chances of
    getting sick.
    -- If you see a bloom, stay out of the water and keep your pets and
    livestock out of the water. You cannot tell if a bloom is harmful by
    looking at it, so it is best to use caution and stay away.
    -- Do not fish, swim, boat, or play water sports in areas where
    there are harmful algae or cyanobacteria.

    Do not go into water that:
    -- Smells bad
    -- Looks discolored
    -- Has foam, scum, mats, or paint-like streaks on the surface
    -- Has dead fish or other animals washed up on its shore or beach
    -- If you are notified that harmful algae or cyanobacteria are in a
    nearby body of water or in your drinking water supply, follow local
    or state guidance to reduce your chances of getting sick.
    --   Check for and follow local shellfish and fish advisories before
    eating any fish or shellfish you collect.

https://www.cdc.gov/habs/be-aware-habs.html



/[ When swimming, watch out where the yellow waters flow... ]/
*CDC Warns Public to Avoid the Toxic Algae “Blooming” in Warming Waters*
- -
Cyanobacteria produces toxins that can harm the internal organs of 
humans and wildlife. Symptoms of exposure include headache, pain, 
dizziness, vomiting and diarrhea. The Great Lakes region enjoys one of 
the world’s largest supplies of fresh water, and residents were shocked 
by the water shutoff, not to mention the signs posted at beaches to warn 
swimmers the lake was poisonous. Local activists sprang into action, 
organizing a ballot initiative to save the lake.

Harmful algae blooms, as researchers call them, are not just Lake Erie’s 
problem. Nearly every state is impacted by the toxic blooms, which 
threaten wildlife, vital economic resources and public health, according 
to the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms. In 2018, a toxic 
bloom in Oregon’s Detroit Lake reportedly caused panic in Salem, and now 
both Oregon and Ohio require water utilities to test for algae toxins. 
More states could soon follow suit. Researchers are now studying harmful 
blooms in the Chukchi Sea, a remote sea in the Arctic Ocean, which was 
once thought to be too cold to support toxic algae. Indigenous fishers 
harvest the same waters for food. Scientists say there are multiple 
causes of algae blooms, but heavier rains and warmer waters associated 
with climate change are combining with water pollution to exacerbate the 
problem.
The Centers for Disease Control recently released a nationwide advisory 
urging people to avoid “toxic algae and cyanobacteria” that can quickly 
grow “out of control” in freshwater lakes and rivers, coastal saltwater 
areas, and brackish bays and estuaries across the country. Harmful 
blooms often look like “mats” of “scum” across the water, and can make 
the water appear different colors, such green, red, brown and blue.

After a campaign by activists, Toledo voters approved a plan to give 
Lake Erie the legal right to defend itself in court, a temporary victory 
for the “rights of nature” movement. However, the plan was thrown out by 
a federal judge in 2020. Toxic algae blooms remain a topic of discussion 
at dinner tables across the Great Lakes region today, especially during 
the summer, when people head to the beach and the blooms appear. Plenty 
of algae occur naturally and are not toxic, but the shallow, western 
basin of Lake Erie has been dominated by the harmful cyanobacteria in 
summers past.

Scientists point to several explanations for toxic algae blooms. Heavy 
summer rains push polluting runoff from industry, cities and industrial 
agriculture directly into rivers and streams, which carry the 
contamination into lakes, bays and coastal areas. This runoff can 
contain excessive levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, often from 
fertilizer. As waters warm in the summer, these nutrients feed large 
blooms of algae, which can suck the oxygen out of the water and endanger 
fish and other wildlife even if they do not release toxins.

With rainfall and warm summer weather being crucial factors in the algae 
bloom equation, climate change has quickly become a topic of interest 
for algae researchers. Researchers now say global warming is making 
algae blooms worse in certain regions of the world and particularly in 
large lakes. One 2019 study used satellite imaging to estimate that 
two-thirds of 71 large lakes across 33 countries saw algae bloom 
intensity increase over the past three decades. Researchers caution that 
there are also far more local causes of algae blooms, including weather 
patterns, naturally occurring nutrients and agricultural practices, but 
global warming is not helping.
Don Anderson, director of the U.S. algae bloom office at the Woods Hole 
Oceanographic Institution, is one of the nation’s top experts on harmful 
saltwater algae. Anderson has studied blooms from Maine to Florida, but 
the biggest climate story is coming out of Alaska, where blooms of the 
Alexandrium cantanella are appearing in the Chukchi Sea. Scientists 
previously thought the sea was too cold for the organism to germinate 
and reproduce in the Chukchi Sea, but warmer temperatures and melting 
sea ice are making the water much more hospitable to huge blooms of the 
toxic algae.

“The same organism that we study and have studied for decades in the 
Gulf of Maine and other parts of the U.S. — we thought for a long time 
that the waters were too cold up there for it to do very well,” Anderson 
said in an interview.

In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy 
of Sciences, Anderson and his team found conditions ripe for large, 
recurrent harmful algae blooms in the Chukchi Sea. A. cantanella grows 
from “cysts” that act like underwater seed pods, which drift from warmer 
waters to the south and become embedded in layers of sediment in the sea 
floor. The concentration of cysts in a “bed” below the Chukchi is among 
the highest in the world for this species, the study found, and the bed 
itself is at least six times larger than any other. Poisonous blooms 
have threatened public health in southeastern Alaska for centuries, but 
now a region that was once immune is poised to support annual blooms on 
a “massive scale.”

“It’s a big story because the people up in that area, local Indigenous 
people, are subsistence harvesters: They live off the ocean, from 
seabirds to sea lions to walrus to whales to all these different marine 
animals that virtually all can be vectors for these poisons,” Anderson said.

Anderson said no one in western Alaska has yet reported becoming sick 
after harvesting from the Chukchi Sea, and scientists are still working 
to understand how the algae’s biotoxins work their way through the food 
chain beyond shellfish. A. cantanella poisons shellfish worldwide, and 
in many places, shellfish harvested for food are tested for algae 
toxins. However, in the remote and tribal regions on the Chukchi Sea, 
testing the day’s catch for algae toxins and monitoring the water for 
blooms has never been part of the harvesting process. For Indigenous 
fishers there, toxic algae are now part of a new climate reality.

People who experience symptoms and believe they have been exposed to 
toxic algae should call their doctor or a poison control center, the CDC 
says.
https://truthout.org/articles/cdc-warns-public-to-avoid-the-toxic-algae-blooming-in-warming-waters/



/[  Military point of view on climate change  ] /
*Climate Change Isn’t a Threat Multiplier. It’s the Main Threat.*
Over the next six months, the defense community should champion and help 
plan a whole-of-society “hyper-response.”
BY ELIZABETH G. BOULTON
*DESTINATION SAFE EARTH*
JULY 2, 2022
COMMENTARY
Why hasn’t humanity responded to climate change—currently on track to 
produce global catastrophe—with the same intensity in which we respond 
to military threats? And is there a way to reorient the defense sector 
to enable and support a whole-of-society effort to protect our planet’s 
ability to support life as we know it?

One barrier is the way we think. Research finds that humanity’s “deep 
frames”—worldviews wired into our neural circuity over a lifetime, and 
which influence perception and decision-making at the sub-conscious 
level—hinder our capacity to understand new kinds of threats. These 
frames, often reinforced by those they benefit, influence security 
posture and institutional design.

This helps explain why the climate crisis is generally approached as a 
scientific, economic, and governance issue. IPCC reports employ social 
scientists, not security practitioners, to tease out climate-security 
issues. Legitimate concerns about securitization help ensure that 
climate response remains a strictly civil matter.

In the security sector itself, thinking about climate change is 
dominated by Sherri Goodman’s original framing of global warming as a 
“threat multiplier” introduced in a 2007 CNA report.  For example, John 
Conger, a former Pentagon comptroller who now leads the Center for 
Climate and Security, writes that global warming is one ingredient of 
many risk factors; it “amplifies” other threats but is not the threat. 
Likewise, NATO’s brand-new 2022 Strategic Concept describes climate as 
both a “challenge” and a “threat multiplier,” last in a list of 14 
security concerns.

Consequently, defense forces the world over are ambling toward 
lower-emission technologies, preparing for more natural disasters, and 
debating the near-term consequences of a degrading global-security 
environment. These debates miss the main point: that we are moving 
toward “a shift to a climate inhospitable for most forms of life” that 
will bring ecological collapse, violence, hardship, and death on nearly 
unimaginable scales.

Is there another way? What if the security sector could be persuaded to 
think of climate change as the central threat? Could it help chart a 
pathway to a safe planet?

A new approach called PLAN E frames climate and environmental issues not 
as an influence upon the threat environment, but as the main 
threat—indeed, a new kind dubbed the hyperthreat—subjected to a 
military-style analysis and response-planning process. The rationale for 
this approach and the methods used are outlined in the Spring 2022 issue 
of the Journal of Advanced Military Studies. To prompt broader imagining 
of what a new threat posture could look like, Marine Corps University 
has published a notional PLAN E grand strategy.

To be precise, PLAN E is the conceptualization and planning phase of a 
six-phase “hyper-response”: a civilian-led, whole-of-society 
mobilization (note: not militarization). The overall mission is to reach 
“Destination Safe Earth” by 2100: a habitable planet “safe” for all 
people and all species.

The strategy was informed by analysis of the hyperthreat’s center of 
gravity (the key characteristic that provides its power) which was 
assessed as being its freedom of action, enabled by its unknowability 
and human hesitancy to respond. The human activity that fuels the 
hyperthreat is overwhelmingly legal, has social license, and is 
understood as legitimate business or security activity, though it also 
includes covert hidden actions. Responsibility for and contributions to 
subsequent “slow violence” are obscured.

The hyper-response strategy envisions three lines of effort: making the 
hyperthreat visible and knowable; reducing its freedom of action; and 
achieving mass and speed of response. Some of its specific proposals 
include a climate emergency peace treaty which would allow all nations 
to prepare to counter and survive the hyperthreat; a “Point Force” to 
address economic and legal dimensions; and a planetary security task 
force to lead a globe-spanning clean-up effort to save “Ally One” 
(nature) through ecological restoration.

The hyper-response could be described as a predominantly bottom-up 
solution; it operates from homes, communities, and workplaces, and up to 
the geopolitical level. It shifts resources and decision-making capacity 
to key locations and local governments while also working to restore 
nation-state agency and fostering eco-multilateralism and regional 
solutions.

This is not just a way to account for the fears and risks associated 
with securitization of the climate response; it is in fact crucial to 
success. The enormous amount of work needed in a short time can only be 
done by harnessing Earth’s large human population; call it a 
“humans-as-ants” strategy. Yet traditional military forces will also 
have key roles: creating the stable conditions that allow the civil 
hyper-response to work, while contributing capability to support it.

If the defense sector can help bring about the hyper-response, it will 
re-align with its fundamental raison d'être—protecting its people and 
territories—in the most important battle humanity has even known. But 
scientific realities mean the clock is ticking. Policy makers should 
immediately fund PLAN E—the planning phase—so that we can begin to 
execute the hyper-response early next year.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/07/climate-change-isnt-threat-multiplier-its-main-threat/368814/ 




/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*July 4, 2011*/
July 4, 2011: The Fox News Channel celebrates its independence from 
reality by bringing on infamous climate-change denier Joe Bastardi to 
attack those concerned about carbon pollution.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/07/06/fox-celebrates-july-4-by-trying-to-debunk-globa/180569


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